My efforts to prepare for the Everest Marathon have me reading everything about Nepal that I get my hands on. So when I was passing through Vancouver recently I was thrilled to find a book entitled “Bringing Progress to Paradise: What I got from giving to a mountain village in Nepal” by Jeff Rasley. Fantastic I thought and immediately bought a copy.
Here is an American who went to Nepal to climb and wound up loving the people and wanting to help the people of a village that his guide was from that was far off the usual tourist trekking circuits. Sound familiar?
However, he spends much of the book in angst about whether it would be better to leave people in their primitive living conditions. As he says ” I still have a sense of tragic apprehension about the future of Basa. Was it right to bring a group of sixteen trekkers to the idyllic village? How many groups of Westerners will it take before the wonderful welcome… I received transmogrifies into programmed theater for the tourists? What can be done to try to ensure that increasing contact with Westerners and modernity create a positive exchange for Basa, as well as the ii?” He also worried that “Proud community reliance on the traditional economy ….could be replaced with menial low-wage service jobs. Villages integrated with the aesthetics and rhythms of nature were despoiled by the squalor and filth of third world urbanism”.
I was really bothered by this North American assumption that we would know what might be best for these “simple” people. So I was pleased when Rasley finally actually seemed to listen to his guide who said “You wouldn’t want to walk a mile to fetch water if running water can be piped into your house. Why should we?” People deserve the right to determine their own destiny and if we can help to make it possible for them to make meaningful choices by supporting self-help projects I am all for it.
Running for Nepal 